A Label That Fostered Mexican Cumbia Gets Its Own Shout-Out

Jorge Ariano, a D.J. known as Sonidero Rumbandela, recited a constant stream of shout-outs at a party celebrating the release of “¡Un Saludo! — Mexican Soundsystem Cumbia in LA.”CreditCreditFarah Sosa

By Gregory Scruggs

April 12, 2017

LOS ANGELES — Elsa Miriam Escobar, a 47-year-old D.J., surveyed the crowd on a recent Wednesday night at La Cita, a downtown Mexican dive bar here. A cluster of twirling couples danced to a cumbia beat under the low-slung ceiling, while onlookers clutched bottles of Victoria beer. Some slipped notes to the D.J. scribbled on napkins, but they weren’t requests.

Ms. Escobar typed up their contents and held up the list for another D.J., Jorge Ariano (known as Sonidero Rumbandela), who used CD players and a laptop to juggle the steady, propulsive beat of guacharaca and güiro punctuated with accordion, guitar and bass. “Un saludo [a shout-out] to José, another to Adriana!” he read in Spanish, in the commanding voice of a master of ceremonies.

The call-outs to specific people, either at the bar or watching online via Facebook Live, never stopped, nearly drowning out the music. While such constant banter would frustrate dancers in some club settings, this microphone chatter is expected in the world of Mexican cumbia sonidera.

Cumbia has roots in the Afro-Latin culture of Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The Mexican variation is slower and features some instruments, like piano, less popular in South American varieties. Most distinct, Mexican cumbia requires a sonidero, a D.J. who will not only play songs but also communicate over them.

With the largest Mexican community in the United States, the Los Angeles area is cumbia sonidera culture’s nerve center north of the border. The city’s dance hall Salon Lazaros packs in up to 4,000 every weekend, and house parties blast cumbia from Compton to Boyle Heights.

During the party at La Cita last week, this flourishing cross-border music scene celebrated one of its most prolific purveyors, Discos Barba Azul. From 2006 to 2013, this one-man independent label, run by Vicente Pedraza, released about 150 CD recordings. A baker’s dozen of Barba Azul’s best are now available on vinyl, cassette and MP3 via a compilation called “¡Un Saludo! — Mexican Soundsystem Cumbia in LA.” It will be released Friday by the New York digital club music label Dutty Artz and the Portland, Ore., imprint Songs From Home, a new joint venture by the ethnographic specialist Sahel Sounds and the reissuer Mississippi Records.

Mr. Pedraza, 42, started the label after years of running a small music shop on South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. His customers asked him for cumbia sonidera, which he confessed he had not yet heard of at the time, so he began hunting for CDs directly from Mexican labels that had no United States distribution.

In 2006, having amassed knowledge of what was selling, he offered to bankroll recording sessions for bands in studios in Mexico. In return, they would mail him the tapes for mastering and pressing in Los Angeles. Rather than royalties, a band would typically receive a flat fee up front, plus CDs.

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Revelers come to dance to cumbia music, but also to hear the shout-outs to family and friends announced by the sonidero.CreditFarah Sosa

Before committing to a full album, Mr. Pedraza would test the market by making compilations to sell at the swap meets ubiquitous in Los Angeles’s Mexican neighborhoods. “When customers asked for a whole CD from a specific band, I told them that I don’t have it — but I’ll get it in a month,” he said.

A tireless promoter, Mr. Pedraza traveled to sonidero parties and radio stations in cities across California and Texas, plus Chicago, Phoenix, Atlanta and Denver. If he was unsure about a track’s potential, he would ask the sonidero to play it live and gauge the crowd response.

Among sonideros, Discos Barba Azul’s material was indispensable. At its peak in 2007, Mr. Pedraza estimates, his label released at least two or three songs playing in the rotation at every cumbia sonidera night across the United States and in cumbia hot spots in Mexico like Puebla, León, Monterrey and Mexico City.

Diego Guerrero, 33, a D.J. with the Metralleta de Oro collective, discovered Mr. Pedraza’s handiwork at the Los Angeles swap meets. “Barba Azul brought cumbia to the modern age with high-definition sound,” he said. “My parents said cumbia was poor-people music, but I didn’t care, because the rhythm reminded me of reggae.”

While the hype-man aspect of sonidero culture — exhorting the crowd to have a good time — will be familiar to anyone who has been to a hip-hop concert, the main focus of the sonidero’s attention is unique to Mexican immigrant life. Sonideros spend much of their time collecting names to recite over the microphone, which serve to connect family and friends across long distances. A partygoer in Los Angeles might shout out to a cousin in Puebla, which the recipient would listen for when tuning in to the sonidero’s set.

“Barba Azul is a portal from those ’hoods in Puebla and the Distrito Federal [Mexico City] to ’hoods here in East and South L.A.,” said Mr. Guerrero.

In years past, a set full of shout-outs was recorded live, then sold on cassette tapes in Mexican communities in the United States and back across the border. These days, it’s more likely to be posted online or live-streamed. That same digital trend ultimately sunk Discos Barba Azul; the label’s CD sales plummeted when most of the material ended up on YouTube.

Alexandra Lippman, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California-Davis, compiled “¡Un Saludo!” and said that while the shout-out may seem like a simple act, it has a deeper meaning. “Cumbia fans speak through the sonidero’s voice to shout out their family and recognize villages left behind,” she said. “The sonideros’ voices create a simultaneous sonic presence between Mexico and the United States, between here and there.”